About "Daylight Noir"

"Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City," comprises photographs of all the ominous, forbidding locations in Los Angeles Chandler wrote about in his novels. These places – from Malibu Pier to the Hollywood Sign, from Union Station to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank's Grill – form the literary geography of his imagination.

Clive James wrote of Chandler's fascination with Los Angeles, "When he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it. When he said that he could leave it without a pang, he was saying why he felt at home there."

But Chandler was also drawn to the Edward Hopper-like loneliness of the city: the separate existences that never, finally, merge. In these photographs, Catherine Corman has given us, as Jonathan Lethem writes in his preface, "a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places...these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes."